Polygon’s Editor’s Letter is a column from Editor-in-Chief Chris Plante that reflects on the video game and entertainment industries, their communities, and Polygon itself. New editions appear in the first week of each month.

One of my more neurotic habits is maintaining a spreadsheet that tracks my media diet. Every movie, TV show, comic, sports match, Japanese study session, podcast, and of course video game gets clocked in 15-minute increments. Each day. 365 days a year.

Time tracking allows me to analyze where and how I prioritize my time. This year, for example, I played a lot of video games — 106, to be precise.

Scanning the spreadsheet, gaming demanded more of my time than any other media — by far. This was intentional. I wanted to keep up with video games in a year of endless new releases. So why does it feel like I missed out?

For this month’s Editor’s Letter, I’ll share my takeaways from a year of drinking directly from the hose. And I’ll hopefully make sense of my lingering FOMO along the way.

Some of what follows will read like the delirious blather of someone paid to, on some level, play video games for a living. But I hope most of my reaction is relatable. Because with services like Game Pass, an abundance of high-quality free-to-play games, and sales seemingly every other week, the challenge for most people isn’t access to games, but deciding what to play.

Or, to put it another way: Everyone’s a game critic now.

I’ve written elsewhere about gaming’s current era of abundance, in which each week a dump truck unloads dozens of new releases, burying the previous week’s haul in the process. Despite the Sisyphean nature of this endeavor, I’ve tried my damndest to keep up and have spent most of the year scrounging through the ever-growing........

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